What Is On-Page SEO, And Why Is It So Important?

Most people in business have a good idea what is meant by SEO. It’s the idea that you want to do things on the internet that help increase your rank in search engines so that people can actually find you.

It turns out, however, the SEO falls into two distinct categories: on-page SEO and off-page SEO. Off-page SEO is pretty much what it sounds like: it’s all the things that you can do outside of your website to boost its rankings. This includes stuff like social networking, blog marketing and submitting articles with links to your site to authority sites like Forbes and Business Insider.

On-page SEO, by contrast, is all the stuff that you can do to improve your ranking on your website itself. This includes things like optimizing page titles, having great meta tags and so on.

Here, we’re going to look at some great on-page SEO techniques you can use to bolster your site. Nu Studio say SEO is important for getting a leg up on the competition, whether you’re a freelancer, business or blogger.

Rule #1: Make Page Titles Keyword-Based

Google preferentially selects titles, sometimes called H1 tags, based on whether or not they match the words being searched for in the search bar. If you’ve got an article entitled “How to make a chocolate cheesecake” and somebody types that title directly into the search bar, then you’re more likely to hit the top of the results. If, however, most people are typing in Chocolate Cheesecake Recipe, then you’re less liable to appear near the top of the results because you don’t have the word “recipe” in your article title and the phrase “chocolate cheesecake” appears towards the end of your title.

It’s a good idea, therefore, to see what the most common searches are to make sure that you are catering to those, rather than just making titles up as you go along.

Rule #2: Include Meta Tags

On every page of your website, you’re able to include so-called “meta tags.” These are essentially labels for search engine algorithms, quickly telling them about the contents of a page. Meta tags should contain relevant keywords that you have researched previously.

Website tools, like WordPress, usually comes with plug-ins or built-in features that allow you to easily specify meta tags associated with an individual page.

Rule #3: Focus On URL Structure

You might now think it, but when it comes to SEO, URLs matter. According to experts, some URLs are friendlier to search engines than others. The data suggests that shorter URLs perform better than longer URLs. It has also been found that the location of keywords within the URL matters a lot too. This is why it is a good idea to specify particular URL names, rather than relying on them to be auto-generated by your web publishing platform. Include keywords on each of your pages that are relevant to its contents.

Also, remember to use images wherever possible in your content. Images, especially those that are unique, can help boost your site.